Georgia Run-Off 2022
How Do Political Campaigns Target Voters?
Methodology
We annotated over 3000 US political advertisers during the 2022 Midterms to try and better understand how campaigns are targeting their ads on Meta platforms (which include Facebook and Instagram). The data source is the Meta Ad Library, most of it taken from the new Audience Tab which shows how much money parties spend on audiences.
Here we zoom in on the Georgia Senate runoff race by only keeping advertisers who:
- advertised in the last 7 days (Nov 25th - 1st December 2022)
- advertised in the last 30 days (Nov 2nd - 1st December 2022) but only if they spend any money on the state of Georgia
Note: Meta only provides 7, 30 and 90 days window for this data and their data lags behind. We will update the report as soon as new data is available.
Overall Stats
First, some overall statistics. Pro-Democrat pages are clearly and consistently outspending pro-Republican pages. Also in terms of volume, Pro-Democrat pages run considerably more ads.
Nov 25th - 1st December 2022 (Last 7 Days)
| All Pro-Democrat Pages | All Pro-Republican Pages | |
|---|---|---|
Total Number of Advertisers |
156 |
185 |
Top Advertiser |
|
|
Total Number of Ads |
4,457 |
2,922 |
Total Spend ($) |
1,662,089 |
918,448 |
Nov 2nd - 1st December 2022 (Last 30 Days)
| All Pro-Democrat Pages | All Pro-Republican Pages | |
|---|---|---|
Total Number of Advertisers |
845 |
759 |
Top Advertiser |
|
|
Total Number of Ads |
39,847 |
16,468 |
Total Spend |
21,703,754 |
10,635,767 |
Spending per Targeting Criteria
How much Money did Campaigns Spend on Targeting Criteria? This graph shows in percent how much of their budget Pro-Democrat and Pro-Republican pages have spent on each targeting criterion. Notably, most advertisers spend the vast majority of their budget (~65%+) on custom audiences, which include custom E-mail lists uploaded by the advertisers.
Nov 25th - 1st December 2022 (Last 7 Days)
Nov 2nd - 1st December 2022 (Last 30 Days)
Top Contested (Interest) Audiences
Here, we show the top most contested interest audiences, i.e. where both Democrats and Republicans have spend considerable amounts of money.
Nov 25th - 1st December 2022 (Last 7 Days)
Nov 2nd - 1st December 2022 (Last 30 Days)
Top Excluded Interests
On Meta, advertisers can also pay to exclude certain audiences. The graph below shows which audiences are being excluded (i.e. how much money advertisers spend on ads that exclude audiences). Interestingly, Pro-Democrat pages seem to both include and exclude likely conservative leaning audiences (NASCAR, Hunting). Pro-Republican pages exclude people interested in Veganism and Toyota Prius.
Nov 25th - 1st December 2022 (Last 7 Days)
Nov 2nd - 1st December 2022 (Last 30 Days)
ZIP Code Targeting
Both Pro-Democrat and Pro-Republican pages target voters in and around cities, most notably Atlanta.